She was the latest North Atlantic right whale found dead, tangled in fishing gear. Her floating carcass was found off the coast of Virginia last month, on January 22. A 10-year-old female, she had just crossed the threshold of her breeding years. Her last previous sighting had been on this side of the border, in the Gulf of St Lawrence on July 29, 2017.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of #3893’s premature death. At least 17 right whales have died in North Atlantic waters in the past year. Of that number, 12 of them perished in Canada — in or near the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There are only 450 to 500 right whales left in the entire world. They’re just about as endangered as a species can get.

The reality in the water is much worse than the alarmingly small number of right whales left on the planet. Only about a hundred of these survivors are females of breeding age like #3893. They also don’t reproduce annually. A breeding female gives birth to a single calf every three to five years, sometimes even less frequently if she’s stressed by other factors.

Researchers know the whales can travel hundreds of kilometres from the location where they first encountered the fishing gear that often kills them. They die by starvation or drowning if they cannot shake off their man-made shrouds. That means #3893 could have met her doom in Canadian waters, though her death actually took place further south after a last desperate migration.

Dead at 10 for many living creatures is a disaster. But for right whales it is an extinction-level tragedy. These animals can live about 75 years and grow up to 16.8 metres long. The can weigh up to 62 tonnes, making them the largest of the baleen whales, and yet they feed on the tiniest of creatures: zooplankton. As enormous as they are, however, they’re hanging on to existence on a gossamer thread.

In a crowded and increasingly polluted ocean, they’re not only threatened by fatal encounters with fishing gear, but also collisions with ships. And there is something else that endangers them that no government has come to grips with: underwater noise. That noise is often generated when resource companies conduct seismic studies to locate possible offshore oil or gas reservoirs that justify exploration drilling.

Here is how it works: Guns vent high pressure air into the water and the sound pulse generated by these airguns reflects off the sea bottom. Seismic surveys are extraordinarily loud, right up there with bombs and chemical explosions. These airguns are fired every 10 seconds for months at a time. The noise can travel for thousands of metres in the ocean and penetrate the sea floor for more than a hundred kilometres. The sound can even form part of the ocean’s background noise up to 4,000 km away.

Although companies using the technology often declare that work is stopped if mammals are observed near the survey area, the mission of the company is to find oil and gas, not to preserve marine species. They are exploiters, not custodians of the environment. That is not a put down, just a fact.

Meanwhile, the growing science on the effect of seismic sounds on the reproduction and survival of marine mammals is disturbing. Dr Lindy Weilgart, an adjunct research associate in the department of biology at Dalhousie University, is an expert in bioacoustics and marine animal behaviour. She has studied the impact of underwater noise on marine life for 25 years. Her words should give any government committed to the environment pause before green-lighting seismic studies by resource companies:

“More and more scientific evidence is coming to light that seismic air gun surveys that precede oil exploration … have a pervasive, widespread impact on the entire ecosystem, from plankton, through fish, lobsters, crab and scallops, right up to whales.”

It is not a theoretical proposition on Canada’s East Coast. Between April 2014 and November 2015, British Petroleum conducted three-dimensional seismic surveys off the shores of Nova Scotia in its proposed drilling area. The Environmental Assessment for the project was done under the auspices of the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Resources Accord Implementation Act — the same board that awarded the exploration licenses to BP. The project description issued by BP Exploration (Canada) Limited covered a massive area — about 1.4 million hectares of ocean southeast of Halifax.

BP itself acknowledged at the time that the seismic survey “could potentially affect marine biota.”

The company’s understatement is staggering.

This is what Dr. Weilgart has found: “Almost all marine animals are highly dependent on sound for all of their functions like mating, feeding, orienting, communicating, detecting predators, hazards, and overall, sensing their environment. They use their hearing like we use sight, so degrading their environment with noise is like blinding us with light.”

“With seismic noise whales stop calling, which means they likely can’t find mates or food anymore, cannot orient, or stay in touch with their calves or group members. They try and avoid the seismic survey and as such, are chased out of important habitat or their migration is altered, putting them in harm’s way. Some become entrapped in ice and die.”

Could seismic surveys by an oil company off Nova Scotia explain a mystery about the recent behaviour of right whales that forced the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans to take protective action? In the fall, the whales head to coastal waters off the southeastern United States, where they winter and give birth to their calves. In the spring, they normally migrate north to their traditional waters off Cape Cod, southwestern Nova Scotia and in the Bay of Fundy.

But in 2015, during the period when BP was conducting its seismic prospecting, something strange happened. An unusual number of right whales began appearing in the Gulf of St Lawrence, north of their expected range. Something was changing their migratory pattern. Was it climate change or warmer water? Or perhaps it was an attempt to avoid the deafening and disorienting effect of BP’s seismic airguns, a general phenomenon noted by Dr. Weilgart.

That is a proposition certainly open to debate. But what is inarguable is that these incessant seismic booms pose a deadly threat to marine life. And Dr. Weilgart is not the only scientist who has come to that conclusion. In April 2016, 28 marine biologists and right whale experts signed a statement declaring that seismic surveys “may well represent a tipping point for the survival of this endangered whale.”

The noise also affects fish, lobsters and scallops adversely — all part of a sustainable industry. Canada exported a record $6.6 billion in fish and seafood products in 2016. Even plankton, the base of the food web, is killed by seismic explosions of noise.

Is the Trudeau government attuned to the threats to marine species in the Gulf of St. Lawrence from seismic surveys and drilling? Is it really committed to “transitioning” to alternative energy sources? Does the government’s new proposed legislation, a monster 341-page Impact Assessment Act, really restore trust after Stephen Harper’s corporate-rigged environmental assessment process?

Or is it all political and bureaucratic razzle-dazzle while the beat from the Harper era goes on?

Are Canadians getting a new car or just a paint-job?

They are certainly getting knee-jerk politics. On January 23, the day after right whale #3893 was found dead off Virginia, Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc took action. He announced immediate changes to the snow crab fishery gear in the southern Gulf of St Lawrence to protect right whales from deadly entanglement.

LeBlanc also instructed the Coast Guard to use icebreakers to help the snow crab season start earlier than mid-April. That way, the gear could be pulled from the water sooner, reducing deadly contact with whales. According to scientists, the whales could be back in the Gulf from their annual migration by April. The minister said the changes would be enforced “very aggressively.”

Then there is the Department of Environment and Climate Change Canada, and its support of offshore drilling on the East Coast.

Minister of Environment Catherine McKenna released an advisory that the drilling project by BP Canada “is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.”

She was advancing a project that began during the Harper years, but it is not the first sign that the feds are hardly striking off in a new and better direction when it comes to the environmental assessment process. In January 2017, the Canada-Newfoundland & Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board approved a four-year extension for Corridor Resources Inc. to explore the Old Harry prospect for oil and gas, off the province’s West Coast. The original license was issued in 2008.

Old Harry is smack in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the Laurentian Channel, about 80 km from the Magdalen Islands. It is also directly on a migratory path for whales, salmon and cod. Federal and provincial natural resources ministers decided not to intervene in the approval. The company plans to drill an exploration well by January 14, 2020.

Fire boats battle the blaze on the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon, off Louisiana in 2010.

While McKenna has minimized the threat to the Gulf of St. Lawrence from offshore exploration and drilling, environmentalists remember that BP was the company responsible for the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest marine oil disaster on record: 3.19 million barrels of oil poured into the Gulf for 87 days. Deepwater Horizon was also an exploratory drilling project, just like Old Harry and the project area off Nova Scotia near Sable Island.

Perhaps that is why environmentalists, who were initially cautiously complimentary about the government’s initiatives, have now put the boots to Trudeau’s dubious omnibus bill designed to regain public trust in the system.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May says “the legislation falls far short of returning us to the environmental standards in place before Harper came to power.”

The Offshore Alliance, a coalition of 19 fishing, environmental and community groups in Atlantic Canada, slammed the draft legislation because it apparently left offshore petroleum boards with considerable approval power over exploration and drilling projects.

It is worth noting that these boards are routinely accused of actually having a mandate to expand offshore exploration and drilling — hardly a confidence builder that they will play it straight when it comes to the environment. (For the record, the boards themselves insist they are only in the regulatory business.)

Gretchen Fitzgerald, national program director of the Sierra Club Canada Foundation, also gutted the Trudeau government’s initiative.

“This decision will damage our oceans, prevent the recovery of species at risk like the right whale, and puts ecologically sensitive regions like the Gulf of St. Lawrence at risk.”

But it took Marion Moore of the Council of Canadians to ascribe a motive to the otherwise bizarre decision by the Trudeau government to retain offshore petroleum boards as part of the approval process for major resource projects.

“Pressure from the oil industry has clearly swayed the Liberal government,” she says.

Wherever the pressure came from, it wasn’t right whale #3893.

More from iPolitics

7 comments on “How the federal government is doing wrong by North Atlantic right whales”

After 30 years in the fishing industry adhering to government mandated conservation rules and glad to do so for the preservation of the industry for the next generations, I have to ask myself why. Why even bother if this is to be the end result?

So, there is part of this story which has been overlooked, even in the most comprehensive coverage of this issue, and that is; Why this year?

Right whale deaths in the Gulf of St. Lawrence have been very seldom in the last two decades, with only 8 Right whales dead from entanglements from 1970 to 2007 and only 28 in those nearly 40 years from ship strikes…. that’s less than one a year.

So why so many in 2017?

Firstly, there is increased cruise ship traffic, up some 35% in the last 10 years. Secondly, climate change has changed where the whales are and when.

The last reason is a bit more intriguing. There was a substantial increase in the Snow Crab Biomass last year in the Gulf. This is a natural event, and snow crab numbers are carefully calculated scientifically, and quotas are set based on this research. However, even though the total allowable catch was up by nearly 50% in a lot of zones in the Gulf, fisherman there are not allowed to set more than their normal number of traps. Well, most fisherman.

You see what is not being reported is that the DFO gave a one time “gift” of 2.5% of the entire catchable number of Snow Crab to the Aboriginal fishermen in the Gulf. There are relatively few Native boats, they make up about 20% of the fishery, so giving them 2.5% of the total allowable catch was a substantial number placed on each boat to catch. Aboriginal fishermen went to DFO and asked for extra traps to catch the extra quota. DFO agreed and some 4,000 – 5,000 extra crab traps, which were hastily prepared (no sinking ropes on a lot of them, older traps scavenged from up and down the shore) and set.

Susanna Fuller of the Ecology Action Center said the waters in the Gulf looked like a bowl of spaghetti with all the floating rope.

When the crab season was abruptly closed (with 2% of the entire quota uncaught), because of whale entanglements, a huge number of these traps were never taken a shore. Feeling upset that their extra 2.5% quota was not caught and it was all for nothing, the decision was made to just leave the gear out.

All of the regular Crab fleet had, by this time, finished their quota and were not particularly upset with the closure, but the boats, aboriginal boats, ladened with tens of thousands of pounds of extra quota, were not pleased. The traps were not the greatest, just whatever they could find and it’s a lot of work to take that much extra gear to shore. So they abandoned a lot of it.

DFO cutters spent the rest of the summer and fall retrieving abandoned snow crab gear, in numbers they had never seen before. Several of the whales entangled were entangled in Crab gear after the season was closed and all traps should have been taken ashore.

When DFO told a meeting of Crab fishermen that there was a big abandonment issue in the Gulf this year, fishermen asked if they had recovered the traps with their identifying DFO issued tags? They confirmed they had, when asked who the traps belonged to, DFO declined to answer.

This is the truth of the issue. Next year, the crab quota will return to normal, no extra quota will be issued (I think they’ve learned their lesson there) and ships will be asked to slow down, but it was a high price the Right Whales had to pay.

But scientists will also tell you, Susan that Right Whales and all whales have keen senses to avoid danger when they are healthy. Dr. Weilgart, at the press conference we had, specifically spoke about whales ‘blundering’ into fishing gear and ships when they are not healthy. When their senses are muted . It’s a shame the extra gear was in the water but healthy marine species have avoided fishing gear and shipping traffic for a very long time. Since there has been no shortage of blame cast on the fishing industry, who always seem to take the hit, it’s great to see national coverage that broadens this tragic story of the loss of the magnificent endangered right whale. Would you agree that since the fishery has to modify its conduct to protect this species, shouldn’t the oil industry have to, as well?

This is by far the best piece of journal that Mr. Harris has put on the table in recent memory. The very essence of his text reverts to IMO to the movie Avatar, in that we are all connected in some natural meme of survival and respect. We have a beautiful planet here, will we offer her completely mute for the sake of greed…. Janis Joplin.. bout as faded as my jeans.

Gretchen Fitzgerald from the Sierra Club summarized this clearly, as this well written and research information by Michael Harris did. Seems to me, the pressure needs to be put on Trudeau and McKenna who sign the approvals for these ugly projects. BP and others know what the effect is on our fish and whales. It truly outrageous Harper signed of with BP and totally ignored the environmental impact these energy projects have in our waters. Harper is still trying to fix the Canadian budget as he sits on a CPC board as their fund raiser. I don’t hear his party jumping up in HOC’s and even mention this issue. Evidently, we now know why. Why and when will our Governments get the message and finally stop killing our food sources with oil spills and research. Is it the money from the big boys or are they just plain stupid?

Author

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.